As you might know, we were very busy in the past months improving EBT and working on new features for the site. We are now ready to publish those changes and take EBT one huge step forward.
The new site may not look like much at first glance, but it's a giant leap towards preparing EBT for the future.
The most significant change is the new menu structure. It's ordered in a much more logical way which allows us to easily add new features one by one in the future, without worrying where to put everything without breaking the design of the site.
The data of the site is now complete kept in Unicode. This new encoding has many many advantages for us but also means having to swallow the bitter pill of needing to convert the database once. Since the old data was encoded in mixed character sets this conversion may not have been entirely lossless. Some hits may get listed with false distances and some cities might contain weird characters now. We will spend some time in the next days to manually fix these entries.
Almost all commands got a directory shortcut. This means that you can access the "About" menu by beta.miuku.net/about/, the form for entering new notes by beta.miuku.net/new/ and so on.
User profiles have been totally reworked. You can now not only share your maps and stats, but your hits, too.
The profile itself has been restructured into a tab-seperated page where you can have a look at the basic and shared data. We also created a private place for users to access their own data and statistics which is completely separate from the public profile.In addition to that there are now profiles for cities and countries, too, which contain valueable and unique statistics.
You are now able to customize certain aspects of the site, for example select your preferred thousand separator or which statistics are shown in the right column.
The link section has been redone and is actually quite useful now.
And last but not least ... lots of new stats and rankings!
When accessing these you'll probably notice another change, too. There is now a queuing mechanism working in the background, which handles requests that would take way too long for the user to wait for. This means that some stats won't always be readily accessible, atomically in sync or might be outdated at times.
I strongly suggest reading the new FAQ / Help section for more information. If you have further questions, suggestions or found a bug, please let us know.
Nerzhul
